Look, if you think your 10-year-old still believes in Santa Claus, you are stupid. Or maybe your kid is. Take your pick. Sorry (not sorry), but those are your only options. Because if your tween is telling you that they consider an overweight man circumnavigating the globe on a flying sled that somehow manages to fit billions of dollars' worth of gifts for the millions of children living in the millions of homes he must visit in the span of one evening as being a completely plausible endeavor, then there's seriously something not right with that kid.

There's a whole host of seasonal child-rearing issues that mommy blogs annually revisit for content. A big one, of course, is Santa. Fretting over kids at school ruining the fantasy for their precious one or wringing hands over perpetuating this big lie are common concerns. But there's a disturbing trend among these blogs in which parents (proudly!) share that their older kids—9, 10, 12, sometimes 14 years old—still believe in Santa Claus.

More often than not, moms take this literal belief in fairy tales as an indication that their child is simply just so special and pure of heart that his innocence hasn't been tainted by the savagery and weariness of the world, enabling him to still hold onto the idea that there really is magic out there. And this is supposed to be a beautiful thing for a parent to behold.

But what's really going on is that their kids aren't innocent at all. They're fucking liars. They're afraid that if they admit to their parents that they don't believe in Santa Claus then they won't get all those presents on Christmas morning. How do parents not see that!? Is it so much easier to accept that your child isn't meeting the super important developmental milestone of deductive reasoning (that most kids reach by 9 years old) than accepting that his heart isn't "pure?" Why would people prefer to think that their kids are slow? If anything, kids who still believe in Santa at a certain age clearly don't understand what a ridiculous undertaking it would be to enter every child's house in the course of one night, probably because they don't understand the scope of the world or that they are not the center of it. So they're stupid and they're assholes.

Oh my God, I would be so fucking embarrassed if, in 10 years, my daughter told me that she still believes that a person could eat millions of cookies in a single night and not die. Or that my husband and I would allow somebody to break into our home in the middle of the night, so long as it's on Christmas Eve. And if she does, I'm going to say to her the same thing that I said to my mother when I was three and she told me that the reason why there was a Toys"R"Us tag on my Strawberry Shortcake suitcase was because sometimes Santa shops for gifts instead of making them at the North Pole: "Don't lie to me."

And if my daughter figures out, like I did, by age three that there is no such thing as Santa Claus, I will not mourn the loss of her childlike innocence. Instead, I will marvel at her advanced ability to analyze information and determine its veracity. I will commend her for keeping it real and gloat about how smart she is. Because it's totally normal for parents to think that their child is exceptional, but they should be ashamed if their special snowflake is snowing them.